How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate to Zero and Why Bounce Rate is not a Search Ranking Factor

While making changes to our google analytics events for our web portal software discoverize, we managed to drop our bounce rate to zero. In this post I share what how we fixed the problem and why I think that bounce rate can not be part of google’s search ranking algorithm.

What Exactly is Bounce Rate?

We all know, the lower the bounce rate the better, but what does it actually represent?

Google analytics defines bounce rate as the

percentage of session, in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page.

Basically it means, that after arriving at your site, the visitor does not go to another page or converts for you (for example newsletter signup).

Usually you would want your bounce rate to be as low as possible – because you want your visitors to convert in some shape or form. Be it by buying something, linking or commenting on your blog post or subscribing. There are exeptions to this rule – because a high conversion rate can mean that your visitor has found what she was looking for – wikipedia is a great example (unless you are actively procrastinating 😉

How We Dropped our Bounce Rate to Zero

Our discoverize portals usually have bounce rate around 40% – which actually is quite a good number for travel related sites. A couple of weeks ago it suddenly dropped by about 50%:

Naturally we wanted to take credit for improving our software and encouraging more interactions with our portals. However we had not deployed any changes in that period that should have affected the bounce rate this much.

So this definetely could not be right… After going through our git commits we quickly found where the mistake came from:

We had added an google analytics event that would trigger as soon as the detail page was opened. A glance at the google analytics events documentation showed that these events count are interpreted as as user interactions. This means that these visits even though not triggering any real interation from our visitors did lower the overall bounce rate.